9 downloadable custom Google Analytics reports

Google Analytics has plenty of standard reports. There are at least 80 standard reports available to you as soon as your tracking snippet is live on your site and sending data to Google Analytics. However, as an analyst, I use only a small fraction of them on a regular basis, and I'm even less likely to use a standard report for a client.

That is not to say that most of the standard reports are useless. There's definitely a great benefit to having such a wide variety of reports available at your fingertips. Clicking around the standard reports is one way to familiarize yourself with a new site and can be just as telling as exploring the website itself. Consider standard reporting the wide-angle view, a way to understand the landscape. There is a lot of information to take in from these reports. But when it comes to making informed business decisions, these reports contain too much data and the data is too generalized.

Using the standard reports is like looking up at the stars with the naked eye. To better understand what objects in space really look like, you need a telescope. This is what custom reports, defined goals, and advanced segmentation can provide -- less field of view, but more clarity. This is the kind of laser-focused attention most marketers and business executives need from their web analytics program. Most of the time, the problem with analytics is not the lack of data, it's the lack of being able to draw insight from the data you already have.

Before you do anything, make sure you have your site goals defined and aligned to your organization's overall business goals. Remember, if you don't write down your goals, they are not goals, they are fantasies. Yes, this applies to analytics too, not just life coaching.

Now I will welcome you to Café Digitaria, where I will be your analytics server for the night. We have a full menu of hand-crafted, custom Google Analytics reports that I think you'll find completely irresistible. In order to download these reports into your own Google Analytics profile, you will need to first log in to Google Analytics, and then click on the links from this article.

For our first course, here's a fine selection of acquisition custom reports, used to best understand where your top customers and site visitors are coming from. First, the "visits and goal conversion by traffic source" report provides a breakdown of traffic sources and referral types reported with goal conversion metrics.

The second report in the acquisition course is the "keyword discover" report. Use this report to find the most valuable search terms that your visitors are using to find your website. The chef suggests a complement of advanced segments -- try this dish with paid search traffic and non-paid search traffic to dive into top terms for paid (PPC) and organic (SEO).

Next, we have a tantalizing offering of "behavior" custom reports. Use these reports to understand how visitors are engaging with the content on your site. Investigate page-level performance with the "page effectiveness" report. And for social media connoisseur, try the "social sharing" report, which is overflowing with social engagement metrics.

Now on to the main course -- conversion. We have prepared three delectable custom reports for you to sink your teeth into.

The "e-commerce report" is a convenient report for trending revenue or purchases against visits, with a traffic sources breakdown. The "campaign goal performance" report is designed to analyze paid search performance against goal conversions by search engine. And last but not least, the "PPC keywords" report provides a great view on paid keywords.

Notes: Change goal one completions to your "engaged visits" goal. This report filters for Google campaigns. To filter for Bing change the source filter to "Bing" or delete the filter to include all search engines.

With these four courses, you should have your fill of custom Google Analytics reports. Each provides detailed information and designed to answer a specific question as it relates to your goals for your website.

When her dreams of becoming a monster truck driver, an international secret agent, and a NASA astronaut fell through, Rachelle settled on being a digital marketing professional. She currently works as a Sr Analyst in Analytics and Optimization at...

Comments

Commenter: Randy Bonds

2013, May 27

Truly great and helpful custom reports. I will use all 9 of them and appreciate you sharing!

Commenter: Shalabh Pandey

2013, May 23

Totally awesome Rachelle, Absolutely useful. And everyone who wants to drill down to the real data- these reports are goldmine and the links to pre-made reports are absolute time saver. Shalabhhttp://TheWhizTimes.com